Thursday, May 26, 2005

It's Different for Girls

On April 30, American journalist Chris Crain became the victim of a hate crime in Amsterdam. While walking in the street holding hands with his partner, he was savagely beaten by seven men shouting antigay slurs. A few days later, Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Program at the Human Rights Watch, expressed some sympathy for the gay-bashers. Crain's attackers were reportedly Moroccan immigrants.

"There's still an extraordinary degree of racism in Dutch society," Long opined to the gay news service PlanetOut. "Gays often become the victims of this when immigrants retaliate for the inequities that they have to suffer."

Welcome to Politically Correct World, where acts that would merit unequivocal condemnation if committed by white males are viewed in a very different light when the offenders belong to an "oppressed group."

The tension between two pillars of the modern left—multiculturalism and progressive views on gender—is not new. It has been particularly thorny in many European countries where, in lieu of an American-style "melting pot" approach, immigrants have been traditionally encouraged to maintain their distinct values and ways. Recently, however, these tensions have started to come out into the open. According to a March article in the German magazine, Der Spiegel, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamic extremist last November after he had made a documentary about the oppression of Muslim women "galvanized the Netherlands and sent shock waves across Europe."

There's a dogma that programs people's psyches. The idea that one must tolerate everyone's beliefs at all costs is one of them. Maybe these poor immigrants have cultures that don't accept homosexuality, or women with uncovered heads. We have to "understand" the pain and suffering these angry people are going through. Some Dutch people's minds are being pulled into very uncomfortable directions. There's a backlash against Muslim immigrants because of the fear that their almost ancient progressive society will be destroyed because of the influx of very conservative religious people. But they're progressive and tolerant, so they feel forced to accept it.

I have to wonder, though. What if a giant group of Southern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptists got together and decided to leave North America, en masse, for The Netherlands?

****SIGH*****

Will the progressive Dutch find such a conflict of principles then? Not bloody likely, except among the truly hash-addled.

You want to alleviate such stress? The first step is to stop ignoring your values for someone else's, as a value. If you think about it for a moment, you'll realize how foolish that is. You can deny your values and accept every injustice if you want, but that wouldn't make you very virtuous. Then what you do is prioritize those values you remember you have. Values like freedom--the lack of physical force being imposed on us. Secular values . Independance. Free expression. Values religious conservatives want to take away. Defend those, and don't let anyone take them away, no matter how much you feel sorry for them. Rape is wrong, no matter who does it. Unless you wouldn't mind being raped by someone yourself--as long as he is oppressed in some way.